Tuesday, February 28, 2017

President Trump will lay out his priorities for the weeks and months to come in a joint session of Congress address on Tuesday.CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump, signaling a potential major shift in policy, told news anchors on Tuesday that he is open to a broad immigration overhaul that would grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants who have not committed serious crimes.

“The time is right for an immigration bill as long as there is compromise on both sides,” the president told the TV anchors at the White House, according to people present during the discussion. The people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the private meeting.

The idea is a sharp break from the broad crackdown on undocumented immigrants that Mr. Trump has taken in his first weeks in office and the hardline positions embraced by his core supporters that helped sweep him into the White House. The president hinted at the reversal just hours before he was to deliver his first address to Congress, although it was not clear whether he would mention it in his speech.

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A move toward a comprehensive immigration overhaul would be a dramatic turnaround for the president, whose campaign rallies rang with shouts of “build the wall!” on the Mexican border and who signed an executive order last month directing the deportation of any undocumented immigrant who has committed a crime — whether or not they have been charged — or falsified any document. The standard could apply to virtually any one of the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally.

The White House did not dispute the report, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, said she had not witnessed the conversation so was unable to confirm it.

“The president has been very clear in his process that the immigration system is broken and needs massive reform, and he’s made clear that he’s open to having converations about that moving forward,” Ms. Sanders said. “Right now, his primary focus, as he has made over and over again is border control and security at the border and deporting criminals from our country, and keeping our country safe, and those priorities have not changed.”

The president’s remarks about immigration came the day before Mr. Trump was to issue a new version his executive order banning travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and suspending the acceptance of refugees. The ban has been revised because of legal challenges.

Donald J. Trump, then a presidential candidate, with employees of Trump National Doral Miami in October.CreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

President Trump hasn’t been saving jobs in the last few weeks, focusing his energy (and Twitter feed) on how to close the borders to immigrants instead.

When he gets back to it, he might spend less time on the workers putting together air-conditioning units in Indiana and more — a lot more — on the maids and janitors who clean Trump golf resorts and hotels.

Rather, it is to argue that by obsessing over how the manufacturing jobs of the 1970s were lost to globalization, Mr. Trump is missing a more critical workplace transformation: the vast outsourcing of many tasks — including running the cafeteria, building maintenance and security — to low-margin, low-wage subcontractors within the United States.

This reorganization of employment is playing a big role in keeping a lid on wages — and in driving income inequality — across a much broader swath of the economy than globalization can account for.

David Weil, who headed the Labor Department’s wage and hour division at the end of the Obama administration, calls this process the “fissuring” of the workplace. He traces it to the 1980s, when corporations under pressure to raise quarterly profits started shedding “noncore” tasks.

The trend grew as the spread of information technology made it easier for companies to standardize and monitor the quality of outsourced work. Many employers took to outsourcing to avoid the messy consequences — like unions and workplace regulations — of employing workers directly.

“It’s an incredibly important part of the story that we haven’t paid attention to,” Mr. Weil told me.

“Lead businesses — the firms that continue to directly employ workers who provide the goods and services in the economy recognized by consumers — remain highly profitable and may continue to provide generous pay for their work force,” he noted. “The workers whose jobs have been shed to other, subordinate businesses face far more competitive market conditions.”

The trend is hard to measure, since subcontracting can take many forms. But it is big. A study last year by Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Alan B. Krueger of Princeton, a former chief economic adviser to President Barack Obama, concluded that independent contractors, on-call workers and workers provided by contracting companies or temp agencies accounted altogether for 94 percent of employment growth over the last 10 years.

Nonstandard employment arrangements like these account for nearly one in six jobs today. That is 24 million jobs, nine million more than 10 years ago.

Many of these jobs are poorly paid. A 2008 study by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Ethan Kaplan, then at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, found that outsourcing imposed a wage penalty of up to 7 percent for janitors and up to 24 percent for security guards.

The Government Accountability Office of Congress concluded that contingent workers in the education field — substitute teachers, adjuncts and the like — earn almost 14 percent less per hour. In retailing they earn 9.4 percent less. Contingent workers across the board are less likely to have health insurance. One-third live in families making less than $20,000 a year. That is three times the share of workers employed in standard full-time jobs.

The rise of outsourced work adds an important twist to the standard understanding of America’s growing wage inequality, which is based on the notion that technology has left less-educated workers behind — taking over their routine jobs while opening lucrative new possibilities for the better-educated.

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The sorting of workers into different classes of companies will further widen the earnings gap as the rewards of the most profitable among them “increasingly go to a more limited group of highly compensated and more-educated workers and to shareholders,” Professor Katz explained.

Manufacturing has gone through this process. General Motors in its heyday employed more than 600,000 workers in the United States, including the engineer, the man sweeping the shop floor and the woman serving coffee. Though the engineer certainly earned much more, the other two could share in G.M.’s success. Norms of fairness, Mr. Weil argues, would limit the wage gap between workers of a single company, giving a boost to those at the bottom.

Outsourcing does away with such considerations. Apple is as successful as G.M. was in its time. But it employs fewer than 70,000 people in the United States. While it keeps engineers, designers and such in house, it doesn’t bother with workers not critical to creating seductive new gadgets. Many of those work for Foxconn, in Asia, where the margins are slimmer and the pay is not as good.

The trend is not unique to manufacturing nor to outsourcing overseas, though. It is happening across the nation’s brick-and-mortar workplaces and coursing through service industries, the fastest-growing segment of the labor market.

These days the receptionist at the front desk is unlikely to work for the hotel. The truck driver may not work for the delivery company, nor the nurse for the hospital. Jobs in coal mining and hydraulic fracturing — even shipbuilding — have been siphoned off.

Though the gig economy is still small — employing 0.5 percent of contingent workers, according to Professors Katz and Krueger — the technologies powering it are likely to fissure the American workplace further.

This sorting would increase the slice of national income going to shareholders and reduce workers’ share. The pattern is consistent with evidence that most of the widening of the nation’s earnings inequality can be explained by growing pay gaps between organizations rather than within them.

Over all, Professor Katz estimates, the sorting of workers into high- and low-end employers accounts for a quarter to a third of the increase of wage inequality in the United States since 1980.

So can Mr. Trump do anything about this? When at the Labor Department, Mr. Weil argued that companies that outsource should share liability with subcontractors for wages and working conditions, so they could not simply wash their hands of responsibility.

It’s not an easy problem to fix, though. As Mr. Weil puts it, “How do you reattach some of the responsibility to the engine of value of these network business systems?” Companies will continue to seek efficiencies by shunting work into these broader networks. And it would make little sense to adopt policies that forbid this kind of business organization. Encouraging unions, which many scholars have suggested as a tool to improve wage growth, could well accelerate the splintering.

And yet, there may be a place for incentives to discourage the weakening of labor standards. Some employers might adopt a system like Harvard’s parity policy to ensure that those in contract positions like guards or cafeteria workers get the same pay and benefits as comparable university staff members.

Whatever its difficulties, addressing the vast transformation underway in the organization of work seems more relevant than tilting at windmills in hopes of restoring American manufacturing to its 1950s state.

The Mokelumne River inundated a farm in the McCormack-Williamson Tract after a levee breach.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times

WALNUT GROVE, Calif. — Until a few weeks ago, the McCormack-Williamson Tract in the California Delta was an island of low-lying farmland, more than two square miles protected from the surrounding rivers and sloughs by earthen levees.

Today the tract is an immense lake, up to 15 feet deep, with fish prowling the water and ducks skimming the surface. The adjacent Mokelumne River, swollen by the intense storms that have drenched the state this winter, caused a levee to break, allowing the water to rush in.

Those same storms led to the recent near disaster at the Oroville Dam 100 miles north of here, which cast an uncomfortable light on the elaborate and aging network of reservoirs, aqueducts, levees and pumps that funnel water to the state’s 39 million people and its $50 billion agricultural industry.

The flooding at McCormack-Williamson was unintentional, but scientists and environmental groups say deliberately creating similar areas — floodplains to allow the state’s rivers to overflow more naturally and benignly — is a way to help ease the strain on this water infrastructure, especially as climate change poses new challenges.

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Bobby Nakamoto, a graduate student at the University of California, Merced, collecting water samples in the flooded McCormack-Williamson Tract.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times

“Nature has been dealing with the vicissitudes of water changes in California for millennia,” said Brian Stranko, director of the state water program for the Nature Conservancy, which bought the tract here, south of Sacramento, in 1999, and has long had plans to restore it. “There are certain things that nature can do that we can’t do as well.”

Moving some of the state’s 13,000 miles of levees back from rivers to make floodplains would allow dam operators to release more water without endangering population centers. Water percolating down through the flooded land would also help recharge aquifers, which, having been severely depleted by pumping for agriculture, are subject to a new state groundwater law requiring that they eventually be made sustainable. And the flooding could restore some of the fish and wildlife habitat that existed in California’s interior valleys before intensive farming began a century ago.

But as with everything else involving water in California, the subject of augmenting the state’s so-called gray infrastructure of concrete dams, aqueducts and other structures with floodplains and other “green” infrastructure, including better-managed watershed forests, is one of intense debate. There are concerns that new floodplains would take farmland out of production and that allowing benign flooding would reduce the amount of reservoir water available for agriculture and other uses.

“California water is complicated,” said Joshua Viers, a professor at the University of California, Merced, who was at the flooded tract last week with a team of researchers using water-sampling equipment and other instruments to monitor the changes taking place. “But I think we’re finding that there are softer paths.”

At Oroville, which was completed half a century ago during the heyday of the push to build gray infrastructure, the immediate danger is past. Trucks last week rumbled up the winding roads to the 770-foot-high dam, carrying rocks and other materials as crews continued to shore up an eroded spillway.

The reservoir level was well below maximum, operators having drawn it down using another spillway that is also damaged. The more than 180,000 people downstream who were evacuated in response to fears of a flash flood are back home.

But the episode was a reminder of the pressures on the major dams among the 1,400 dams of various sizes in the state, where water levels are actively managed to control floods, make electricity, provide water for drinking, irrigation and recreation, and keep the dams and the people below them safe.

After five years of severe drought in the state, in which water all but vanished from some reservoirs, this year is on pace to be one of the wettest on record. Dam operators follow specific rules on releasing water, set by state and federal regulators, which require leaving room for anticipated storms. This year that balancing act has been more delicate than usual.

Floodwaters pouring through a levee breach near the Cosumnes River near Sacramento last week.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times

The rush of runoff that affected Oroville when a warm storm hit the Sierra Nevada, bringing more rain and less snow, exposed the need for proper maintenance throughout the water system, and the potentially high cost when things go wrong. Repairs at Oroville alone could run as high as $200 million.

The pressure on dams and other parts of the system is expected to rise as global warming continues. Computer models suggest that climate change will exacerbate a trend toward extremes — very dry or very wet years. By producing more rain and less snow in the mountains, atmospheric warming will also alter the amounts and timing of the runoff that fills the reservoirs behind dams like Oroville. Operators may have to release more water earlier in the year.

But critics say the system is not flexible enough. At dams, like Oroville, that generate electricity, the rules on water releases are set for several decades as part of licensing requirements of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, known as FERC. Even nonhydropower dams have rules that are based on more static conditions.

“California’s dams must be adapted to address new risks from a changing climate,” Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, wrote in a blog post after the Oroville crisis. But, he added, “when it comes to changing course on dams, institutional inertia is a powerful countervailing force.”

“We’re already looking at a changed hydrology,” he said. “And that’s going to continue to change. So how we operate dams as well as other water infrastructure is going to have to change.”

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Michael Eaton, a former Nature Conservancy official who has a small farm at his home in Galt, Calif., paddled a canoe across a driveway to his property near the Cosumnes River.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times

Mr. Andrew said a mix of conventional infrastructure like dams and alternative approaches — including floodplains but also technologies like desalination and wastewater recycling — should be used to manage the state’s water.

“The bottom line is we would like to see a diverse set of strategies, implemented at a local and regional level,” he said.

At the McCormack-Williamson Tract, after the levee was breached two weeks ago the Nature Conservancy made a cut at the opposite end to allow the river waters to flow through. When the wet season ends, the tract should drain and dry out, although there still may be occasional flooding in parts of it.

A more deliberate experiment is taking place about a half-dozen miles to the east, at another conservancy plot on the Cosumnes River.

Mr. Eaton’s property, flooded by the Cosumnes River.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times

Dr. Viers refers to the Cosumnes as the state’s “ugly duckling” river — it has never fit into water-management plans. As a result, unlike all the other significant rivers on the western slope of the Sierra, the Cosumnes is essentially undammed and flooding is largely uncontrolled. Farmers in the area have adapted, growing crops or raising orchards that can tolerate winter inundations.

The flooding can be a nuisance nonetheless. For days at a time over the last month, Michael Eaton, a former official with the Nature Conservancy who has a small farm at his home in Galt, has had to leave his car on one side of a flooded driveway and paddle a canoe a couple of hundred feet to reach the property.

“It gets a little tiresome,” said Mr. Eaton, who is thinking of having the road raised.

At times, Mr. Eaton said, he can see and hear air bubbles popping up through the water as it infiltrates the soil. “It’s groundwater recharge in real time,” he said.

The undammed nature of the Cosumnes also makes it a useful laboratory, both for studying how stream flows and flooding are changing under more natural conditions and for assessing the impact of green infrastructure. Not far from Mr. Eaton’s home, the conservancy bought a 500-acre plot along the river, called Oneto-Denier; punched a hole in a levee to turn it into a floodplain; and planted native vegetation as part of the restoration effort.

Dr. Viers and others have been studying the plot, and so far the results are encouraging. Among other things, they have measured a significant amount of water returning to aquifers.

“This little ugly duckling is now showing us the way in which we can better manage rivers downstream,” Dr. Viers said.